Plasma Physics Simulations on Next Generation Platforms

The current high-performance computing revolution provides opportunity for major increases in computational power over the next several years, if it can be harnessed. This transition from simply increasing the single-processor and network performance to a different architectural paradigms forces application programmers to rethink the basic models of parallel programming from both the language and problem division standpoints. One of the major computing facilities available to researchers in fusion energy is the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center. As the mission computing center for DOE, Office of Science, NERSC is tasked with helping users to overcome the challenges of this revolution both through the use of new parallel constructs and languages and also by enabling a broader user community to take advantage of multi-core performance. We discuss the programming model challenges facing researchers in fusion and plasma physics in for a variety of simulations ranging from particle-in-cell to fluid-gyrokinetic and MHD models.